Battle of Heligoland Bight (1914)

The Battle of Heligoland Bight was a naval battle fought on 28 August 1914 during World War I. This first naval battle of the Great War pitted the fleets of the British Royal Navy and the Imperial German Navy against each other in the North Sea, and it resulted in a great British victory.

Background
In the period before World War I, large warships were the world's most prestigious and expensive military hardware. Possession of such ships was the mark of a world power.

Britain was the world's dominant naval power and considered its Royal Navy essential to the defense of Britain against seaborne invasion and the maintenance of overseas trade. Germany engaged in rapid naval expansion from around 1900, but the growth of its fleet was more than matched by Britain. In 1914, Britain's Royal Navy had 29 modern battleships, compared with Germany's 17.

Leaving the Royal Navy to defend the English Channel and Atlantic coasts, France was able to concentrate its smaller navy in the Mediterranean, where it had overwhelming local superiority over the Austro-Hungarian Navy, which was based in the Adriatic.

Battle
At the start of the war, the British and French navies successfully fulfilled their first essential task - to protect the transportation of troops to the European battlefield across the English Channel from Britain and across the Mediterranean from North Africa. The Allies also set about clearing the oceans of German and Austro-Hungarian merchant shipping and roaming warships. Meanwhile, the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet faced each other across the North Sea.

Admiral John Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleet, was intensely conscious that his warships were Britain's only defense against a possible German invasion and must at all costs be preserved. The High Seas Fleet, commanded at the start of the war by Admiral Friedrich von Ingenohl, was too inferior in size to challenge the British to a battle. Ingenohl's strategy was to wear down the Royal Navy in piecemeal engagements until British naval forces were sufficiently weakened to be defeated in a culminating battle.

The British offered the Imperial German Navy a suitable opportunity in late August 1914. Commanders at the British naval base at the North Sea port of Harwich planned an operation off the German coast at Heligoland. British submarines were deployed as bait to lure German patrol boats under the guns of a force of destroyers and light cruisers, but once German cruisers arrived at the scene the Royal Navy ships took a battering. They were saved by a squadron of British battlecruisers, commanded by Vice Admiral David Beatty, which emerged from the mist to outgun all the other vessels. Three German light cruisers were sunk in the confrontation. The Royal Navy could claim a clear victory.